Everyone has denounced this, including the Chinese government. The genetics community is outraged, anticipating backlash and regulations.

I’m familiar with official ethical statements about gene editing by large bodies such as the National Academy of Sciences. At first glance they seem reasonable.

But what is almost always omitted is any admission that we barely understand the process by which evolutionary systems generated the code in the first place!

The elephant in the room is:

While people talk about humans now improving the genetic code intentionally for the first time in history, they never bother to mention that the best engineers at Microsoft and Google don’t even know how to write code as good as the code that bacteria write all the time!